beef in beer

I knew there were two rump steaks in the freezer that we brought with us from Somerset – the very last of the Dexter beef.  There’s no way we’d ever eat a whole steak nowadays – it’s just not the sort of meal we have – so I decided, that in light of the chilly weather, we might have a steak pudding tomorrow.  (Pete is not offally fond (sorry) of kidney, so we never have that in a pud).

I want to make the pudding in the slow cooker; it’s much easier, never boils dry, and can be left while we go out, but in my experience they work better if the filling is pre-cooked, so that’s what I did this morning.

I normally make a base of carrot and celery for a beef casserole, but there was a head of fennel in the fridge (and, indeed, no celery), so I used that, and three carrots.  Chopped into small cubes, and sauteed down in olive oil till softened. Then chopped a large onion and a few cloves of garlic, and some fresh sage leaves, and they got the same treatment.

The steaks were cut into chunks, and browned off – the cats got the trimmings, so they were happy. All of this was put into the slow cooker, and Pete was despatched to buy a bottle of beer; he returned with a bottle of Fursty Ferret from Badger Beers, which seemed appropriate.  I deglazed the meat frying pan with the beer, added a teaspoonful of grain mustard, and a tablespoon of flour, decanted that into the slow cooker, and added salt and black pepper.

I’ll leave it cooking for about six hours – it’s smelling good!

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reactive winemaking!

I’m getting the hang of this winemaking lark now, and I’m much more confident than I used to be.  We did our monthly trip to Makro on Saturday (first time the car had been out for a fortnight!), and they had a 5kg bag of carrots reduced to £2.30.   “Wine!”, I thought, and bore the bag home in triumph, along with 96 cans of cat fud and other essentials.

5kgs is a *lot* of carrots, I may tell you, but Pete and I topped and tailed them and chopped them up, and then I boiled them up in my preserving pan (bought from eBay a couple of years ago, and so useful).  We had to do it them in two batches.  You want the liquor for wine, and the carrots can be repurposed for eating.

I had a little ham hock in the freezer, and I put it in the slow cooker yesterday before I went out.  So, in a serendipitous style, I had a load of nice ham stock for soup.  One half of the Jordan carrot mountain went through the Magimix and into a big pan with the stock, and that’ll be this week’s soup, or the start thereof.  And I have some coriander to go with it, which will be nice.

The other batch of carrot will be liquidised and, somehow, shoehorned into th freezer for another soup.  I really can’t get used to living with just one freezer, and it’s always full to bursting, with me wanting to cook still more.

I have a big batch of Gujuerati beef curry in the slow cooker right now, and space will have to be found for that too … I’ll write the recipe up tomorrow.

And there are cheese scones and some cocktail sossidges in the oven for supper …

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beef with clementines and ginger wine

There was a 3.75lb hunk of silverside in the freezer, and a tub of clementine mush (clementines that have been boiled and liquidised – I normally use them to make a cake with ground almonds).

So diced and sautéed two big carrots, a courgette and two sticks of celery, together with a red onion cut into big chunks. Chopped up the silverside and browned it off. Sliced some mushrooms and fried them gently. About four cloves of garlic were finely chopped and softened in some olive oil, then I added the clementines and about the same again in cold water, stirred it round until it came to the boil, then added a good sloosh of ginger wine.

Dumped everything in the slow cooker and left it on low overnight – it made 8 portions, and we consumed two last night with dumplings, accompanied by broccoli and cauliflower. Fit for a king.

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meatballs

As my loyal reader will have noticed, we’re moving house in a few weeks.  And we have to empty the freezers.  We just about eaten our way through all the prepared meals, so now we’re starting to make inroads on the raw ingredients.

For some reason, we had 3lbs of sausage meat in the freezer; I suspect it was left from Xmyth, when I would have planned and failed to make sausage rolls.  So out came 2lbs, and 1lb of mince.  Pete combined these with some allspice, ground dried ginger, black pepper, salt, fresh thyme, sage, majoram and savory, and a teaspoon of lazy garlic.  That made 53 small meatballs.

In the meantime, I sliced up two red and one yellow pepper, and sautéd them down with 1.5 thinly sliced red onions.  Bunged that in the slow cooker, then set to frying the meatballs in batches.  They went in the slow cooker too.

Then I tipped the oil out of the frying pan, and added a jar of tomato salsa (well, why not? – it needed eating!), a glass of red wine – the end of a bottle that had, inexplicably, not been drunk, and the last of the lazy garlic.  And a generous teaspoon of chilli flakes.  All into the slow cooker, with a bit of water.

It smells gorgeous, and will make lots of meals.

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a pound of mince? Meatballs!

As mentioned, we had a pound of mince to use up, as it wouldn’t fit into the new freezer regime.

I minced some garlic and a shallot, and chopped some fenugreek leaves small, while Pete ground spices (black cumin, lots of coriander seeds, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamon, allspice, black pepper), and made that lot into meatballs with a bit of sea salt.  It made 16, I think.

I cut an onion in half and half again, and cut it into thin rings, then fried it in ground nut oil (together with more garlic) till it was translucent.  Then we added more spices (more coriander and cumin, ajwain, nigella, fennel) and cooked it down for a bit.  In went a jar’s worth of roasted yellow peppers, sliced thin, and I set it to cook over a low heat.

I browned the meatballs in more groundnut oil, and tipped them (and the oil) into the pepper sauce.  Left them to cook while I did some basmati, to which I added a shallot, some cardamon seeds, and a generous pinch of Marigold veg bouillon.

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a weekend’s cooking

We had already set aside Saturday evening to make a batch of Pete’s Wondrous Chilli – the beans were boiled and slow-cookered on Friday night, and we set to and made it yesterday afternoon.  4lbs of lovely Dexter stewing beef was turned into 10 really rather generous portions; we shall have  some for supper tonight, and four tubs have gone in the freezer.  We cooked it overnight in the slow cooker, and the smell drove us quite demented.

Yesterday, Pete sallied forth with his bicycle and trailer to do the shopping, and returned bearing (amongst lots of other things) two huge bunches of herbs; one of coriander, and one of fenugreek, which I’ve never seen before in its fresh form.

The coriander was easy – we found four chicken breasts in the freezer (we are really getting it under control now!) and a batch of lemony coriander chicken is in the slow cooker now.

I’ve never cooked with fenugreek before, but we put some leaves in the chilli (well, why not?!).  I also minced up the last of the breast of lamb we had last week, grated up carrot, celery and onion, chopped garlic and fried it up with the lamb. Added my version of the Ras El Hanout spices I love so much*, and bunged in about a cup full of lentils. And more fenugreek. That’s currently cooking slowly downstairs on a diffuser, for a moussaka in the week.

I’ve had enough now, although I might just whip up a pear and chocolate crumble, as there are pears that need eating. (Pete has just said “ohmigod”).

* I should have made a note, but I used lavender, rose petals, paprika, cloves, cinnamon, ground ginger, galangal, coriander seeds, cardamon seeds, peppercorns, mace.  It might not be authentic, but it smells nice.

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slow cooked beef rib

I usually do this in the oven, but being in slow cooker experimentation mode, I decided to try it in there.

One rib of beef – not very big, probably only a couple of pounds.  Ours was a slab of Dexter, bought from the wonderful Mr Rawlings. I browned it in some groundnut oil, and put it in the slow cooker pot.

Then I cooked up some carrot batons and about a dozen shallots (always wise to put shallots in boiling water for about five minutes – makes them much easier to peel, and then you get nice oniony water for stock).  I added a bit of maple syrup to the pan at this point, to start the vegetables caramelising.

In went a tablespoon of flour and a heaped teaspoon of grain mustard, stirred round, then I started experimenting.  Half a glass of red wine, a slosh of teriyaki, two heaped teaspoons of marmalade – (the redcurrant jelly had gone mouldy :(.  Some ground peppercorns and juniper berries, the onion water, some sea salt.  Reduced the liquor a bit, then put it in the pot with the beef.

Cooked on auto for 3 hours, then low for another, while we did roast potatoes and cauliflower and yorkies (can’t remember the last time we had yorkies).

I’ll be doing that again – the meat was just beautifully tender.

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3lbs of stewing steak

I wanted to make Anjum Anand’s Gujerati lamb with fenugreek dumplings at the weekend, so sent Pete out to the icy wastes of the outdoor freezer to fetch some lamb.  He returned without, as he couldn’t find any, and it’s all gummed up with ice and we need to defrost it.  But he was clutching about 3lbs of Dexter stewing steak.

Anjum’s book isn’t big on beef, so we compromised, switched things round, left it to cook a lot longer over a low heat – I did most of it, while Pete struggled with a recalcitrant RAID array in our Linux server, and then he did the dumplings.  And delicious it was too.

But I only used half the beef – we’re not big meat eaters, so I put in far more chickpeas than she recommended, and thus was left with the same amount again to deal with.

On Monday, we stirfried some with some tinned black beans from the chinese supermarket (gorgeous – but half a tin was too much; wonder if they freeze), and green pepper and so forth.

And on Tuesday lunchtime, I whipped up the rest of it into a pie filling.  Fried off the beef, then quickly sautéd a chopped onion, some garlic, three big mushrooms chopped, and a couple of carrots, diced.  In a big casserole dumped the beef and veg, a slosh of red wine, a small tin of tomato purée, a slug of balsamic vinegar, a little water, a bouquet garni and some seasoning.  Brought it to the boil and then put it on a very low heat on a diffuser, and we suffered the smell wafting up the stairs all afternoon.

Cheated, and got some puff pastry out of the freezer to make the pie, which we had with potatoes roasted in olive oil, and broccoli and cauliflower.

So, that 3lbs of beef made:

• 8 portions of beef curry (I put three tubs in the freezer)
• 4 portions of pie (we shall have the rest of it tomorrow or Friday)
• 2 portions of stir fry

Which I think is not at all bad.

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beef stroganoff

Using up: ribeye steak, mushrooms

Along with the three sausages, we also returned from Summer Camp with a heap of ribeye steak, which simply didn’t get eaten.  I flung it in the freezer in the general melée of dealing with wet tents, missing cats, etc., but a carton of organic mushrooms in the fridge gave me pause for thought …

So: cut a big onion in half, and slice it as thinly as you can.  Sauté that with lots of butter (this is not a good recipe for cholesterol haters) and oh, about a tablespoon of paprika until the onion is soft.  Then add mushrooms, sliced, and continue to cook until the mushrooms are soft.

Decant this paprika-y mess on to a heatproof plate and keep it warm.  Wipe out the pan.

Take steak (it really does need to be good quality for this, trust me), slice it into 1/4″-1/2″ strips across the grain. Fry this in batches in sunflower oil until it’s done as you like – we keep it fairly rare.  Drain out the oil from the pan, put everything back in, add soured or double cream, lemon juice, seasoning and chopped flat-leaf parsley.

It may be thought of as heresy, but we always eat this with chips.  I know, I know, but if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it properly.

By the way, chips, peas and ice cream are the only frozen goods I buy – everything else I freeze myself.

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boeuf stroganoff

I hate waste, and we had a bunch of flat leaf parsley which looked a bit tired. So what to do?

We also had some mushrooms, and so I nipped, or popped, to the Local Shop and bought some cream. And then I remembered there was a fillet of Dexter beef in the indoors freezer.

This is one of our favourites – it’s Rick Stein’s version, and he recommends that you serve it with thin chips. Who are we to argue? – it works remarkably well. We do tend to increase the mushrooms and decrease the meat, but that’s because we don’t like too much meat in a dish.

Recipe:

675g of beef fillet, preferably cut from the tail end
65g unsalted butter
1.5 tbsp of paprika
1 large onion, very thinly sliced
350g button mushrooms, very thinly sliced
3 tbsp sunflower oil
300ml soured cream
2tsp lemon juice
a small handful of finely chopped parsley
salt and black pepper

Cut the steak into slices 1cm thick, then cut each slice across the grain into strips.

Melt the butter in a large frying pan, add the paprika and onion, and cook slowly until the onion is soft and sweet, but not browned. Add the mushrooms, and fry gently until they are softish. The recipe says 3 minutes, but that’s not nearly enough in my experience. Transfer to a plate and keep warm.

Wipe out the pan with some kitchen paper, then heat half the oil in there till it’s very hot, add half the sliced fillet steak, season it and fry it quickly for a minute or so. Put aside to keep warm (I use the dish with the onion and mushrooms in it), and repeat with the rest of the meat.

Put everything back in the pan, add the soured cream; bring to the boil, and cook for a minute or so. Then fling in the parsley and lemon juice.

Delicious!

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